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“If there wasn’t no fight, there wasn’t no weekend.” (O. J. Simpson)
Weekend v3 CATS2 Clear time and plan ahead   Make the most of your weekends!

Do you ever get the feeling that weekends just whizz by in the blink of an eye? You finish work on Friday, maybe head out for one or twelve after-work drinks and KA-POW! – It’s Monday! No vodka-tonic induced missing time is even required, Saturdays and Sundays just vanish into thin air on their own!

The true tragedy is that if you work full-time, weekends are typically the only true breathing space you get, so you’d really hope to make the most of them. Ironically, people often tend to do the exact opposite and wind up doing absolutely nothing, usually under the guise of not wanting to stress about it. In the long run, this is pretty sad. Now, we‘re not saying you need to spend every single weekend horseback riding in the Himalayas or skydiving naked; hell, in fact we’re both big fans of the occasional “Do nothing“ weekend ourselves. The trouble is, however, you often get into a rut of complacency and laziness, and before you know it, your last four weekends have involved so little noteworthy activity you couldn’t even write a text-message about them.

We‘ve found that two key factors often seem to lead to weekends being wasted both in the sense of missed possibilities and also in the sense that they are not nearly as relaxing as they could be.

1)   First of all, typically many people find upon waking up Saturday morning that their schedule is already pretty full – with chores: picking up laundry, shopping for groceries, cleaning, defrosting the freezer, assembling an IKEA fuckswing, etc. With a little bit of haphazard time management, you might even manage to effectively spend the whole day running errands. This is bad not only because it tends to stress you out even when you’re supposed to be recharging and relaxing, but also because it stops you from undertaking more substantial activities. Happily, there’s an easy fix for this: Do everything during the week. Schedule that stuff right into your calendar: pick up the laundry on your lunchbreak, defrost that freezer Tuesday evening and grab some groceries on the way home on Friday. Leave your weekend open for the fun stuff.

2)   Second of all, most of us simply aren’t very good at planning weekends ahead of time. When asked, anyone can come up with cool stuff they could undertake over a weekend: hiking with a friend, driving to a nearby city or even taking that long overdue course in abstract impressionist nude painting. Still, when the actual opportunity to do some of these things comes around on Saturday morning, most of us are astonished and totally unprepared. If you start planning a weekend at noon on Saturday, odds are your plans probably won’t come to fruition. Courses are full, trains are booked and that buddy you were planning to go hiking with is out of town. Damn. The simple fix to this is to plan ahead. Make bold plans and ask people to join you as soon as you have an idea of what you want to do. If you manage to implement this habit, the benefits are considerable: you feel immeasurably better on Monday knowing your weekend was well-spent, and best of all, you now have something awesome to look forward to during the week! Even the worst 80+ hour Mon-Fri grinds are bearable as long as you have something cool waiting just a few days away. And while some bohemian types might think that any form of planning is detrimental to their creativity and spontaneity, spending every single weekend sprawled across your couch is the true detriment.

 Here are 4 simple steps to get you started:

  1. Next Monday, make a list of all the non-work related little errands and tasks you have to do during the week. This list will likely be updated during the week (see our post on doing sports on Mon-Tue).
  2. Put these tasks into your calendar, making appointments for every single one. Before work, during lunch and after work are all good times to cut down on your weekend to-dos. Make use of them.
  3. Whenever you find yourself losing motivation at work (probably Monday around 9:05 and thereafter in half-hour intervals), think ahead to the weekend. Do you have something cool to look forward to? If not, it’s time to make a plan. Decide on something you really want to do that makes you say: “I can’t wait till Friday!“
  4. Start planning: check weather reports, arrange for transport, book hotels, rent kayaks, get tickets for events and so forth! If appropriate, call friends and ask them to join you. Go for solid committments, don’t settle for “Sounds good, but I’ll see how I feel.“ It’s make or break time!

Weekends v3 Clear time and plan ahead   Make the most of your weekends!

So to conclude, are we advocating awesomnification of weekends? Absolutely. Are we saying weekends are wasted if they are spent e.g. watching a Jersey Shore-marathon or trying to outdrink every bar in the city? Absolutely not, if the people indulging in these activities are happy themselves.

Many great weekends to everyone!

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